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MANLIO DINUCCI -- NO WAR NO NATO

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

The Day Vladimir Putin Passed NAFTA

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist.
His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books

The U.S. is entering a dangerous political phase where
a distant and cloistered political class threatens the use of state power to
legitimize itself in the face of declining popular support and serial military
calamities of its own making. In 2001 the George W. Bush administration used
the opaque and as yet not fully explained events of 9/11 to claim legitimacy as
faux protector of the American people as it launched catastrophic wars that
destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan and unleashed ongoing chaos across the Middle East.

With uber-hawk and unindicted co-conspirator Hillary
Clinton favored to win election under a cloud of suspicion for pay-to-play
practices as Secretary of State and in widely declining economic circumstances
an imperative to change the subject will assert itself the day after election
day. Having demonstrated a propensity for wanton slaughter in Bosnia, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and the streets of major American cities (1994
‘Crime’ bill), Mrs. Clinton is already busy stoking a new Cold War with Russia
to cover her own activities.

The neo-con choice of Russia as menace-of-opportunity
joins a long history of defining American politics through negation. In the
original (‘classic?’) Cold War national identity served as an
envelop-of-convenience for conciliatory economic policies within the U.S. and
repressive and opportunistic policies abroad. Since the 1970s selective (class
based) economic liberalization has cut labor and the poor adrift as a
self-serving ruling class has gorged itself at the public trough through
bailouts, privatizations and special privileges.

The Cold War was always largely a business enterprise—
the communist boogeyman was used by the U.S. to overthrow democratically
elected governments and install business-friendly regimes that would answer to
U.S. (corporate) interests. Its resurrection is to reassert a national
‘envelop’ as cover for economic interests now ‘freed’ to treat a growing
portion of the domestic population as imperial subjects. Growing resistance
suggests a need for more convincing misdirection if the status quo is to be
maintained.

Ongoing neo-con claims that Russia invaded Ukraine are
to cover the U.S. role in facilitating a coup against the popularly elected
government there and depend on American ignorance of the longstanding Russian
naval base at Sevastopol for plausibility. Furthermore, against explicit
promises not to do so, since the early 1990s the U.S. (through NATO) has built
military bases in Eastern Europe surrounding Russia. This as the U.S. embarks
on a multi-decade program to ‘upgrade’ its nuclear weapons arsenal.

Surrounding Russia with NATO (U.S.) military bases is
generally analogous to the Russians building military bases on the Mexican
and Canadian borders with the U.S., only without the historical precedent of
sequential, devastating land invasions that the Russians have faced. What
cloistered neo-cons in the U.S., led by Hillary Clinton, call military
‘strength’ is a perpetual upping of the ante where each step is ‘rational’ in
some political-economistic sense while the broader enterprise risks collective
suicide.

As strategy, doing so leaves either capitulation or
full scale confrontation as likely responses. A ‘third-way’ was tried when
American economists were sent to post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s to ‘help’ with
privatization of the Russian economy. The result was a bifurcated economy where
99% of Russians were deeply immiserated while select ‘oligarchs,’ were made
stupendously rich. Luckily for the economists, enough Russians died from
privation during their ‘experiment’ to leave few witnesses to the fiasco.

For cynical Americans raised on Cold War propaganda,
the idea of Western academics scamming gullible Russians with long-discredited
capitalist ideology might be good for a laugh were these same people not the
‘brain trust’ behind the bi-partisan governing consensus in the U.S. in 2016.
The economics used to loot Russia were absolutely conventional, the very same
used by Bill Clinton to ‘liberate’ Wall Street from social accountability, to
liberate the American working class from gainful employment and to ‘free’ the
American poor from burdensome food and rent money.

The Russian reaction to being immiserated was to turn
away from the American-style economic liberalization that remains the
Democrats’ core economic program in the U.S. The seeming inability of the American
political class to learn from its mistakes proceeds from the assumption that
current outcomes are mistakes in any sense recognizable to it. Highly
cloistered class divisions leave it impervious to the negative consequences of
its economic policies much as it is to those of its foreign policies.

Following passage of NAFTA economic competition was
used to explain the engineered immiseration of the American working class. But
without commensurability of circumstances the idea of a global labor market makes
little sense. The implausibility of displaced auto workers in Detroit packing
up their families and possessions to live for $10 per day in southeastern China
illustrates the conundrum. ‘Capital,’ connected capitalists with extensive
social resources, can build factories abroad. But without a standing army to
repatriate profits, that scheme has never worked very well.

Conversely, with the racial repression that followed
the nominal end of slavery in the U.S., at what point did American Blacks
receive the market wage that no longer suppressed wages more broadly? Notice
the formulation: Blacks whose wages were held down through systematic racial
repression (Black codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow and now mass incarceration)
acted in a ‘market’ sense to lower the wages of wage-dependent Whites. This is
the ‘market’ explanation of race relations in a market economy when the
(liberal) premise of market-driven outcomes is applied.

It is this latter point — that rigged economic
institutions produce rigged outcomes, that liberal Democrats try to explain
away with identity politics. NAFTA, like the TPP that follows, is designed to
shift economic power from labor to capital. It is also designed to exploit
residual imperial relations to divide labor along engineered lines of division.
In the U.S. the state created and enforced racial repression to serve economic
interests. This is the residual of imperial relations that to which NAFTA was
added.

By siding with existing economic power Western
liberals chose the paradox that by destroying the institutions that make
markets ‘free’ like labor unions and collective bargaining (see Adam Smith on
manufacturer combines suppressing wages) economic outcomes can still be claimed
to be ‘market’ based. In a general sense in the case of Russia, the Russian
people wanted none of it once it became clear that American intentions were
collaborative looting of the Russian economy.

Americans have a longer history of market mythology to
wade through. If slaves produce goods that have economic value then demand for
wage labor is reduced relative to the goods produced and the difference accrues
to capitalists. If NAFTA ‘frees’ capitalists to produce goods in Mexico or
China under neo-colonial conditions (see Foxxcon suicide nets) a similar process
takes place. This sleight-of-hand works by tautologically defining all labor,
including slave labor, as freely undertaken.

It is hardly accidental that Barack Obama, and soon
most probably Hillary Clinton, frame corporate-power enhancing agreements like
the TPP in terms of geopolitical competition. Much as Democrats use Republicans
(and vice-versa) as foils, the U.S. powers-that-be need a Russian ‘strongman’
and Chinese economic ‘connivance’ to sell trade deals and foreign entanglements
to an already hard-pressed American working class. Here the relation of
economic interests to geopolitics re-enters.

Like her husband before her, Hillary Clinton has
committed to the economically paradoxical position of increasing social
spending and balancing the Federal budget. Bill Clinton addressed this paradox
by reneging on his promise to increase social spending. In terms of factual
possibility, balancing the budget has always been a canard used by Republicans
(and national Democrats) to cut social spending. There is no fact-based reason
why a balanced budget is either necessary or virtuous.

The political-economic position that this leaves Mrs.
Clinton in is that her major benefactors on Wall Street and in executive suites
want policies that weaken the position of labor and immiserate the bottom 90%
or so of the population. And the pressure relief value of increased social
spending will be ‘off-the-table’ much like it has been under Barack Obama and
Bill Clinton so as to balance the budget. Even if neo-Keynesian pleaders get
through to her the response will be ‘public-private partnerships,’
privatization and tax cuts that benefit the wealthy.

The political problem for the establishment is that
the polity is in various stages of open revolt. In the long-held American tradition
of dividing to conquer, Mrs. Clinton has drawn battle lines in a class war by
dismissing the most economically put-upon half of the polity as ‘deplorables,’
as racist hicks who lack the vocabularies and table manners to properly earn
their keep. That these same people had jobs until the Clintons sent them to
Mexico and earned their keep until Wall Street cut their pay to nothing helps
clarify precisely who it is that is deplorable.

Russia re-enters as the mythical boogeyman, a/k/a
convenient foil, for the remote and calcified ruling class to pin its own
misdeeds on. Julian Assange has now clarified that, Clinton ‘team’ assertions
to the contrary, Russia is not the source of the Wikileaks revelations that
will serve as fodder for ongoing investigations if Mrs. Clinton wins election.
A crisis of legitimacy is all but guaranteed. If ‘things’ begin to unwind as
circumstances suggest they might, expect the war drums to beat louder.

PUTIN AT VALDAI

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